Heresy 195 and the Mists of Time

[Melifeather]

1 hour ago, Black Crow said:

Ah not quite. GRRM did confirm a contextual link between the rise of Valyria and the arrival of the Andals, but not a direct contact. It was the classic migration pattern of several peoples on the move, ripples as one displaced the other.

As to the decline of dragons, that is attributed rightly or wrongly to the maesters of the citadel - a First men foundation if no longer confined to them

I understand that the reasons why people migrate are varied, but I don't think its unreasonable to think that the Andals were fleeing dragons.

I actually do recall something connecting the origins of maesters to First Men, but cannot locate. Do you have such a link or something to reference? They do seem "Andalized" to me though. Maybe it's their proficiency with ravens that make it seem like they're connected to First Men?

[Black Crow]

4 minutes ago, Feather Crystal said:

I understand that the reasons why people migrate are varied, but I don't think its unreasonable to think that the Andals were fleeing dragons.

The short answer according to the World Book is that they were pushed out of Essos by the Valyrians, but it was avoidance rather than conquest

[Matthew.]

1 hour ago, Black Crow said:

No, although the business of letting shades [ghosts presumably] into the world is often invoked, the story is quite clear that Mance rallied the free folk behind him in response to the growing threat from the blue-eyed lot and then, having gathered them together set them to digging.

...

 All we know is there's a mystery, but it wasn't the digging which started this.

I don't disagree that this "probably" what happened, but I don't know why you insist that he could have only looked for the Horn, or even been digging in the Frostfangs after the Others were already stirred up. There's no reason that Mance and a small coterie couldn't have gone poking around in the Frostfangs well before he was the King-beyond-the-Wall.

[Brad Stark]

Regardless,  if the Andals hadanything that could defeat magic,  they would have conquered or pushed out the Valyrians. 

[Black Crow]

Just now, Matthew. said:

I don't disagree that this "probably" what happened, but I don't know why you insist that he could have only looked for the Horn, or even been digging in the Frostfangs after the Others were already stirred up. There's no reason that Mance and a small coterie couldn't have gone poking around in the Frostfangs well before he was the King-beyond-the-Wall.

Entirely possible, and I did say that we don't know who he really is and what he's really up to, and did say that he might have stirred up Craster's boys before becoming king. However the business about the shades came from Ygritte, talking about what Mance the King had set them to doing.

[Black Crow]

5 minutes ago, Brad Stark said:

Regardless,  if the Andals hadanything that could defeat magic,  they would have conquered or pushed out the Valyrians. 

I'm not sure that magic per se was involved, just dragons and even then the World Book is a bit quiet on that. Yes they used dragons to destroy the Ghiscari but there's no mention of their being used against the Andals who seem to have avoided battles rather than lost battles.

[Black Crow]

50 minutes ago, Feather Crystal said:

I actually do recall something connecting the origins of maesters to First Men, but cannot locate. Do you have such a link or something to reference? They do seem "Andalized" to me though. Maybe it's their proficiency with ravens that make it seem like they're connected to First Men?

I can't find anything specific. We've tended in the past to link the maesters with the "wise" who helped broker the Pact and as you say there's the raven link, but text I can't find - and I think GRRM is being deliberately vague - what may be significant however is the writing of history by Andal septons. If the maesters had an Andal origin I'd expect them to be writing the histories rather than the septons.

[Matthew.]

25 minutes ago, Black Crow said:

Entirely possible, and I did say that we don't know who he really is and what he's really up to, and did say that he might have stirred up Craster's boys before becoming king. However the business about the shades came from Ygritte, talking about what Mance the King had set them to doing.

Well, I agree that Ygritte is the problem with my theory, if for no other reason that she's probably too young to have been a part of any gravedigging that might have initially reawakened the Others--though I'll note that, if there was anything nasty to be found in the Frostfangs, it's quite possible that they released more "shades" during a later excavation.

In any case, it's worth keeping in mind that something that separates Mance from the other wildlings is that he was raised at the Wall. Which raises the question--is Mance literate? Would he have had occasion to peruse the texts at the Wall? Mance's project at the Frostfangs seems like an awfully large gambit, unless Mance actually believes that the Horn is something that can be found, and there's the present mystery of what he's hoping to accomplish in the Winterfell Crypts. It may be that he has more information at his disposal than just the oral traditions of the Free Folk.

[Black Crow]

7 minutes ago, Matthew. said:

In any case, it's worth keeping in mind that something that separates Mance from the other wildlings is that he was raised at the Wall. Which raises the question--is Mance literate? Would he have had occasion to peruse the texts at the Wall? Mance's project at the Frostfangs seems like an awfully large gambit, unless Mance actually believes that the Horn is something that can be found, and there's the present mystery of what he's hoping to accomplish in the Winterfell Crypts. It may be that he has more information at his disposal than just the oral traditions of the Free Folk.

Mance's "separation" may go deeper than that. Osha says he wasn't born north of the Wall.

[Melifeather]

45 minutes ago, Brad Stark said:

Regardless,  if the Andals hadanything that could defeat magic,  they would have conquered or pushed out the Valyrians. 

Not "defeat" magic...ward against magic, which is totally different. Ward means to protect against or prevent. We don't know if iron works against dragons, but we've read about crypts being warded with iron swords to keep the spirits from rising. Theoretically iron would prevent the dead from rising as wights or even as perhaps whatever Coldhands is. Maybe a dragon egg could be prevented from being hatched if kept near iron? Just spitballing with that last one.

[Black Crow]

23 minutes ago, Feather Crystal said:

Not "defeat" magic...ward against magic, which is totally different. Ward means to protect against or prevent. We don't know if iron works against dragons, but we've read about crypts being warded with iron swords to keep the spirits from rising. Theoretically iron would prevent the dead from rising as wights or even as perhaps whatever Coldhands is. Maybe a dragon egg could be prevented from being hatched if kept near iron? Just spitballing with that last one.

Given that the Andals got out of Dodge ahead of the Valyrians I doubt that there was any magic weaponry or warding involved, which is in any case getting away from the original question as to how the Andals were more successful than the First Men in dealing with the tree-huggers.

I still don't think that it was a matter of magic or warding against magic with iron or anything else, but rather an absence of magic which the tree-huggers could draw upon - there was no Hammer and no Long Night, or any other magic on that scale.

[Melifeather]

I don't think the importance of iron as a ward should be dismissed. There's definitely something there. Think of the King in the North crown: a bronze circlet surrounded by iron swords. There's a message there that the iron is warding the magical properties of bronze.

Getting back to dragons, each generation was smaller than the one before it and I think it's more than captivity. Captivity is said to be bad for them, but if a dragon only grows according to the size of it's cage, then the ones hatched and kept in the Dragon's Pit in Kings Landing should have been relatively the same size, not progressively smaller. 

[LynnS]

I question what it was that Dany or more specifically Mirri Maaz Duur released into the world when she performed the blood magic.  She woke the old powers.  Then dragons are born and according to Quaithe, fire mages can climb fiery ladders when previous to Dany's appearance; they couldn't do something as simple as draw fire from obsidian.

Mel also says that her powers are growing at the Wall; implying the power within the Wall is also growing. She specifically tells Jon that he can use that power, if he chooses. I also question what Dany released into the world when she destroyed the HoU with it's power source, the blue heart.  The HoU is a prison of sorts and I wonder if a ward was destroyed; releasing that power back into the world as well.

So it calls into question the appearance of the WW previous to these events or closely aligned.  If Leaf has been waiting for the Bran Boy to appear and the PwiP is a fairly recent prophecy; these events might have been foreseen and Craster's boys have been tooled up in advance.

I like Matthew's conjecture that the NK and 12 brothers were imprisoned in ice at the Frost Fangs and released unwittingly.  That would be an interesting explanation for Coldhands.  Who is primarily concerned with avoiding the WW.  That's rather strange. 

The fabric of space and time is also weird in these places of sorcery going by Tyrion's experience at the broken Bridge of Dreams.  So I think it's entirely possible that the effect can precede the cause.  I think we see something of this kind of  time loop with the Jon and WeirBran encounter, while Bran is still hiding in the crypts of Winterfell and has not yet been wedded to the tree.

[Black Crow]

8 hours ago, Feather Crystal said:

I don't think the importance of iron as a ward should be dismissed. There's definitely something there. Think of the King in the North crown: a bronze circlet surrounded by iron swords. There's a message there that the iron is warding the magical properties of bronze.

Oh there's no doubt about the warding properties of cold iron, but at that level the First Men never had much problem dealing with the tree-huggers. I'm still talking about the Great Magick, which is conspicuous by its absence during the Andal conquest

[Black Crow]

8 hours ago, Feather Crystal said:

Getting back to dragons, each generation was smaller than the one before it and I think it's more than captivity. Captivity is said to be bad for them, but if a dragon only grows according to the size of it's cage, then the ones hatched and kept in the Dragon's Pit in Kings Landing should have been relatively the same size, not progressively smaller. 

Similarly, while Marwyn explicitly declares that it was the maesters who did for the dragons last time around, I'm not so sure. Its possible that they may have hurried them on their way but I think we'll find the root cause was a general decline of magic. Dragons are creatures of magic and their decline may simply have reflected a decline in the magic that sustained them

[Melifeather]

3 hours ago, Black Crow said:

Oh there's no doubt about the warding properties of cold iron, but at that level the First Men never had much problem dealing with the tree-huggers. I'm still talking about the Great Magick, which is conspicuous by its absence during the Andal conquest

IMO when the Wall was built the magic that created the white walkers was contained too, and if any remained it was weaker. 

[Matthew.]

In interpreting magic's waxing and waning, I'm inclined to give a great deal of credence to both Marwyn's comment about the gray sheep, as well as Quaithe's conversation with Dany in aCoK, after they witness a street performer conjure a burning ladder:
 

Quote

"Half a year gone, that man could scarcely wake fire from dragonglass. He had some small skill with powders and wildfire, sufficient to entrance a crowd while his cutpurses did their work. He could walk across hot coals and make burning roses bloom in the air, but he could no more aspire to climb the fiery ladder than a common fisherman could hope to catch a kraken in his nets."

Dany looked uneasily at where the ladder had stood. Even the smoke was gone now, and the crowd was breaking up, each man going about his business. In a moment more than a few would find their purses flat and empty. "And now?"

"And now his powers grow, Khaleesi. And you are the cause of it."

"Me?" She laughed. "How could that be?"

The woman stepped closer and lay two fingers on Dany's wrist. "You are the Mother of Dragons, are you not?

The tone of this conversation, as well as Marwyn's later assertion of an anti-magic conspiracy, suggests a causal link between human behavior and magic's strength.

I believe this is borne out by the text, because magic did not return (nor decline) in a generalized way, nor did it do so in a consistent way. By all appearances, the magic of the old gods was weak for a very, very long time, including during a period where Valyrian magic was strong. Thus, we can at least demonstrate that magic does not strengthen or weaken in a broad, global fashion. The decline of Valyrian magic was also far shorter than the decline of the old gods.

Furthermore, the return of the Others and the raising of the dead seems to have happened years before Valyrian sorcery began to reawaken, while the street performer and the alchemists in Westeros have seen an abrupt (not something that has built up gradually) increase in their power, directly in the aftermath of the return of the dragons.

I'm wary of going too far down the road of trying to place "rules" on Martin's magic, but I do think that an important recurring factor with Craster's Keep, Mirri's tent, and what Bran witnesses in the weirwood is the importance of sacrifice--the more profound the sacrifice, the "stronger" the results. Something that is echoed in both the WB's account of the hammer of the waters, and the myth of Azor Ahai.

[Lady Dyanna]

On 2/15/2017 at 6:12 PM, Feather Crystal said:

I don't think the importance of iron as a ward should be dismissed. There's definitely something there. Think of the King in the North crown: a bronze circlet surrounded by iron swords. There's a message there that the iron is warding the magical properties of bronze.

 At least that the importance of Iron as a ward can't be dismissed. Not only do we have the iron swords guarding the Stark tombs, the tunnels through the Wall are also gated with iron bars. Seems to me that iron might have the capacity to block any spirit from roaming and quite possibly protect against it's use or sacrifice in working magic. 

As an opposing equivalent, I think that bronze is a ward or protection against the use of blood in magic. Think of the bronze blade that MMD uses to sacrifice the horse in order to "heal" Drogo. Or even the fact that the bronze sickle is used for the execution of the man that Bran sees in front of the Winterfell heart tree. 

Bronze and iron are the metals that protect against Winter. They are part of the Reeds oath right along with Ice and Fire and Earth and Water. There's a reason that we see them referred to together and in the capacity that they are, or at least I believe that there is. 

[Black Crow]

4 hours ago, Lady Dyanna said:

Bronze and iron are the metals that protect against Winter. They are part of the Reeds oath right along with Ice and Fire and Earth and Water. There's a reason that we see them referred to together and in the capacity that they are, or at least I believe that there is. 

I'm not so sure. The other elements in the oath are opposite but equal - Ice and Fire most obviously - but bound together because the land is one. Bronze and Iron almost certainly represent men and suspect that the significance of the pairing lies in the different factions united together under the Starks.

[Melifeather]

If the hatching of dragons reawakened magic in the east, then an equivalent and inverse event happened in the west to bring about the return of white walkers.